So You’ve Survived Your First Week of Law School
Have you? Sure you have.
Maybe its been rough, maybe its been a breeze. (I doubt the latter, but in case that is you I recommend being vigilant and don’t think because you’ve “got this” means you’ll automatically do well on finals.)
Whatever variety of spice law school has thrown into your gut, fear not–it gets better. No really, it does. Well, it gets worse first, but then it gets better. Maybe I should have said that up front.
I have met but a minuscule number of people that have not only survived, but thrived and flourished in their first year. If you are one of them: congratulations. You are now the envy of your classmates but you also completely perplex and frustrate them. Try to keep the “this material is invigorating,” “the professor makes me feel alive,” and “I didn’t ever think the law could instill this much passion in me” to a minimum. Sure, you’re happy, but this is not a case where happiness breeds happiness — it just breeds resentment. Your classmates don’t want to hate you, but they find themselves avoiding you more and more each day.
Now back to those of you who feel lost, overwhelmed, see case briefing as daunting, professors as evil despite their attendance taking smiles, and the hundreds of pages of reading every night as an insurmountable task. As I’m sure you’ve already begun to do, you’ll navigate these treacherous waters and find your way just like you’ve done in your pre-law school life. Because after all, your supreme life navigational skills are what got you here in the first place.
Your 1L year is going to take a lot of treading water and dodging near-misses and squeaking in under the radar by your chiny chin chin. And all the while I imagine you’ll be thinking “why are these professors so cold,” “why don’t they show compassion or at least crack a smile or tell a joke?” Because you understand this is all very serious business but this constant drudgery is deadining to the senses.
And that is the point.
My second year I took a professor for professional responsibility that I had for civil procedure my 1L year. He was tough and firm and serious but not-too-serious and even joked now and again. But his method of calling on people to ‘dance’ as he put it, was terrifying. I elected to take him that next year because I knew his style and knew I would learn enough from him that I wouldn’t need a commercial supplement to pass the MPRE. But I digress. The first day of that professional responsibility class he was downright pleasant. He was so pleasant and open and full of jokes and laughs and discussed the material without calling on a single person that all of us that had him the year before were giving each other sideways glances wondering what dimension we had fallen into.
professor suspends law students' hearts
He must have seen our slightly frightened dismay because he followed with this line: “Did you notice how you felt un-human last year? We ripped your hearts from you, quite intentionally. It was our job to remove you from yourself, to make you forget you had feelings. You needed to be re-wired, to think about the law not as a human being, but with your mind. But here, that year is over, we’re happy to give your hearts back”
And as simple as that law school became about people. So it does get better. It takes a while, but soon enough you can expect your heart (though slightly beaten and bruised) to be handed back along with that rush of feeling you’ll have missed and learned to forget. But it comes back and when all is said and done, you’ll never ever want to repeat your first year of law school but you’ll always appreciate what it has taught you, both out of the books and about yourself.
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[...] fairly good explanation of how they scare you to death in the first year. AKPC_IDS += [...]
Hey now. We Michigan kids don’t start for more than another week. Don’t ruin the surprise! ;)
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Claire Marie Reply:
August 21st, 2009 at 8:01 am
@Paul, Sorry!! :)
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I wish someone had told me this information at the beginning of my first semester (rather than having to find it out my second year on my own.) I think there would have been a LOT less nights spent crying and seriously considering dropping out if I had known that it got better and that my professors didn’t REALLY hate me.
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Joshua Auriemma Reply:
August 21st, 2009 at 7:08 am
@Kim, Doesn’t this story sound ridiculously similar to Holland? Civ Pro and Evidence were essentially night and day.
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Kim Reply:
August 21st, 2009 at 7:12 am
@Joshua Auriemma, Holland was actually the professor I was thinking of, amusingly enough. He was the one who really, really, REALLY made me want to quit. And then even second semester he was so much better, and by the third time I had him, he was one of my favorite professors (aside from Storrow.)
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Thanks so, so, very much for this. Def needed at the end of the 1st week.
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Claire Marie Reply:
August 24th, 2009 at 9:16 am
@Shaz, you’re oh so very welcome: glad to know it helped :)
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Things didn’t get real for me until my second day of 1L. A guy in my section came to Contracts five minutes late. “You–what’s your name?” barked my Prof. P.
The late-comer murmured an answer.
“Louder!”
“M— X,” said the late-comer, barely audible.
“Mister X, you will NOT be late AGAIN.” Snapped Prof. P. Then, without giving Mr. X a chance to sit down and collect himself, P pressed on with the attack. “Mr. X, the case of Hawkins v. McGee ended in a nonsuit. What’s a nonsuit, Mr. X? Oh, you don’t know? Where’s your dictionary?”
This continued for substantially the whole hour. The next morning, the rest of the section was fifteen minutes early for Contracts, dictionaries in plain sight, and trembling with fear.
That professor later became one of my best friends in law school.
The brutality of 1L does have something to do with forcing you to “think like a lawyer.” As one attorney I met put it: 1L prepares you to practice, since “the grilling you’ll get from a Court of Appeals is nothing like the grilling you’re going to get from your first-year professors.”
More important, I think, is this: it initiates you into the profession. I met a lot of attorneys on the Metro that first year–carrying your casebooks in plain view will start conversations in a town full of old lawyers. Every old lawyer I met was able to connect with me and bond about 1L.
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[...] around the blawgosphere found my little blown out eyes reading the reassuring words over at Legal Geekery that, yes in fact, I did survive the first week of law school. Now, I did two semesters of [...]
I just started LS this week, one thing I’m confused about but your site made it a little more clear. In using OneNote i’ve created notebooks for each class
In creating outlines (I should worry about this say mid october – right?), or using OneNote how do you note take, say your readings and lectures
Do you do lectures on one page in OneNote or even its own section and readings in their own section/page?
Right now In my notebook I have sections: General(Syallbi, etc), Readings (Notes from my readings), Lectures (Notes from my lectures), Cases (where I will store my briefs)
How do you suggest?
Thanks in advance!
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Joshua Auriemma Reply:
August 24th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
@Dole, everyone does this all a bit differently, but my outlining process is generally a matter of sitting down, processing all my lecture notes and rectifying them with my general understanding and notes from cases / book briefing.
I don’t use OneNote (I use a wiki) but if I did I would essentially have one notebook for each class where I take lecture notes, and then my outlines would synthesize all the lecture material by using my marked textbooks.
Of course, this is all a learning process and everyone has a different way to go about it.
Good luck!
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Claire Marie Reply:
August 24th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
@Dole, I just used regular old Word and it worked well for me, but only you know how you’ll like a program.
As for integrating notes and lecture notes: I tended to use the syllabus/book-index as the outline for the notes and when something would deviate inside a subject matter I’d insert it under a heading of “Book Notes” or “Professor/Class Notes” to get it all in one document (so case briefs, class notes and my own were all together) and to distinguish between the two in case a professor felt a particular way on a subject (to remember to use that information on an exam).
As far as a study-outline, yes October is a good time to start cutting the fat from that note/brief document. If you keep it organized from the beginning it’ll be almost no trouble at all. My problem was mustering the motivation to keep the regime going so I usually ended up doing a little more work at the end of the semester than I should have.
Best of luck!!
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ouij Reply:
August 25th, 2009 at 8:09 am
@Dole, I take my notes on paper, with a pen. When outlining time comes around (optimistically, October. Realistically–more like Late November), I recompile them into neatly-formatted & indexed outlines using the LaTeX document markup language.
The trouble with typing notes in real time is that you will be tempted just to transcribe whatever is going on around you. Not everything is important. The key is to take better notes, not more notes.
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[...] school and my job here is to teach you what I can about life as a 1L. Claire wrote an excellent post about surviving your first week of law school, but I’m going to do something a little [...]
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